After finishing top of Stanford’s MBA class, Roelof Botha rejected two job offers. The third, from Elon Musk, was decisive.
Roelof Botha, grandson of former foreign minister Pik Botha, now leads the world’s largest venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, and is responsible for $55 billion in assets.
Botha still has the original recruitment letter signed by Musk himself and thinks fondly of his time as director of corporate development. Today, the company, overseen by Botha, has become an umbrella organisation for venture capital firms worldwide, including those in India and China. Botha is the grandson of the late minister of foreign affairs, Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha. The youngest Roelof shares his grandfather’s middle name.
At the time, Botha said he was reading about what was going on in Silicon Valley and was set on challenging himself against the world’s best and riding the wave of the internet. Musk thought traditional banks were outdated and set out to disrupt them, launching X.com as an online financial services company. This would morph into PayPal.
Botha rose to become PayPal’s CFO, and once he left, he said that Musk had not provided the board with a full picture of the company’s problems. Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world. “In America, there are many people who attended one of the top high schools in the world and who’ve studied at one of the top universities, and there is always this question mark at the back of your mind – Can I compete with these people?”
In making early, contrarian bets on YouTube and Instagram, Botha said there is some pleasure and defiance in saying, “We’ll show you!”., which called PayPal’s executives deranged. A few years later, they became millionaires when PayPal was bought by eBay. Botha personally apologised to investors on whose behalf Sequoia invested millions into FTX when the crypto exchange collapsed in November 2022.
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